HOW TO MOVE THE MARKETS called an episode in the early sev- enties which involved Qyantum's portfolio of Japanese stocks. "I used to trade it at home, until about 2 A.M.," the associate said. "One night, at midnight, George called me and said, 'Sell the Japa- nese portfolio.' I said, 'There are only two hours of trading left- sell the whole portfolio?' 'The whole portfolio.' " Soros was in Washington, D.C., when he called, this person continued, and in the next two days the United States govern- ment put restrictions on trading with Japan. "George is a terrific intelligence officer," this person added. Over the past thirty years, Soros has developed a worldWIde network of contacts, one that he is in a unique position to harvest today. "His network is amazing," Astaire asserts, adding that it includes a host of foreign ministers and central bankers. "And he works at it all the time." Soros further expanded his access to in- formation by farming out money, to be handled by promising fund managers all over the world, who then became his sources. And he made the discovery of "emerging markets" a staple of his invest- ing before the term had even been coined. Upon learning from his sources that lib- eralizing measures to open a country to foreign investment were being planned, Soros would set up a joint venture with a native there which could trade in the lo- cal market; when the market opened, his investments would increase dramatically in value. What Soros excelled at, essentially, was identifying those lacunae where percep- tion lagged behind reality, leaving room for exploitation. "A lot of people who in- vest get terribly excited," he once told me. "I was always detached-and that enabled me . . . to study the game as a game. I was particularly focussing on changes in the rules of the game, not in playing by one particular set of rules but understanding when new rules came into being-and learning that before others did." For nearly thirty years, Soros's invest- ing-both in form and in content-was ahead of the game. It depended on infor- mation but also, to a great degree, on a certain mind-set (powered by both intu- itIon and a superlative analytical capacity) 61 / . ' I, .. 'C " - ( % ( "Paloma designed these especially jòr me. " . and on a process of trial and error-a con- tinuous playing out of his preoccupation with the relationship between participant and observer. It was a way of life that was, by all accounts, consuming, largely devoid of emotIon, and almost completely self- enclosed. But Soros thrived And the ar- eas in which he had long been lacking- personal and professional relationships, judgments about character and motiva- tion, all that derived from instinctual life experience-did not interfere with his success. Peter Rona, who is the head of the First Hungary investment fund, in which a Qyantum fund owns a stake, and who has known Soros for about fifteen years, told me, "George has a very abstract mind-to the point that he is almost de- humanized. The higher the level of ab- straction you're dealing with, the better George gets; the more you're dealing with something about which no scientific hy- pothesis can be formed, no general laws applied, the worse he gets." Rona continued, "The excellence of his judgments about markets exceeds by a comfortable margin his judgments about people." And he added that this was part of the reason that Soros "has never made money by discovering the company that became a great success but, rather, by discovering markets-which are not 1 " persona. Byron Wien told me that Soros "tends to think of himself in the third person," and went on to say, "He wants to achieve . certain objectives-he gets his satisfaction from that, not from human relationships." He added, "George has transactional re- lationships. People get something from him, he from them." Nowhere was this rather mechanistic approach more vivid than in Soros's rela- tionships with his employees. Legions of traders passed through the revolving door of Qyantum; some are said to have lasted only a day, others a week. Some who weren't fired quit, because, although they were well compensated, they decided that the experience was too punishing. Soros was expert at targeting people's weak- nesses-scathing in his sarcasm and eager to stir internecine riva1ries as a means of augmenting his control. (Once, when he had just hired a group of six money man- agers, he is said to have summoned them all into his office and announced, "Gentlemen, in one year there will be five of you. Now leave.") A former employee told me that he has concluded that Soros has "a horror of intimacy." He said, "George spends most of his energy with other people pushing them away, includ- ing insultingly. . . . You'd put your heart into something and George, in front of everybody, would say, 'I'm shorting it.' It was rude, brutal-he was in your face all the time." In conversations with me, Soros al- luded to his relationships at Qyantum as another illustration of the detachment thåt has so dominated his life "There was